Low-Cost Carbon Offsetting and Trading

This paper describes our approach and experiences in carbon credit trading with barcodes. It provides a account system for enabling a small amount of carbon credits to be drawn from or paid into accounts and uses barcodes as certificates for the rights to claim carbon credits in carbon offsetting and trading. It enables any items to be sold with carbon credits to mitigate CO emission from the use and disposal of the items by attaching such barcodes to them. It also enables the consumers that buy products with carbon credits to hold and claim these credits easily. The approach was constructed and evaluated with real customers, real items, and real carbon credits in a supermarket. It increased the sales volume of products with the items 3.5 times more than the ordinary sales volume.